The price of admission to Japanese politics is high

SETSU KOBAYASHI is still smarting from his brief foray into Japanese politics last year. A constitutional scholar, he set up a centrist political party called Kokumin Ikari no Koe (“The Angry Voice of the People”). But the people were not as angry as he thought: none of the party’s list of ten candidates won any of the seats allocated by proportional representation in elections for the upper house of parliament. They had each deposited ¥6m ($53,000) to run, which they all forfeited. The whole exercise left Mr Kobayashi ¥60m out of pocket—the price of a nice apartment in Tokyo. “Never again,” he says.

Candidates for first-past-the-post seats in parliament pay half as much (¥3m)—but that is still swingeing by international standards (see chart). This creates a big obstacle for new parties or independents trying to break into politics. Tokyo is about to hold elections for its local assembly; candidates must stump up ¥600,000 to stand. Tomin First no Kai (Tokyoites First), an upstart party founded this year by Yuriko Koike, the city’s governor (pictured), has had to raise millions of yen to register its novice candidates. Setting the cost of entry so high favours the big political parties, backed by unions and industry lobbies, complains Akira Miyabe of Greens Japan, and helps ensure that parties like his don’t get a sniff at office. “The system is clearly unfair and unconstitutional,” he says.

Britain inspired Japan’s Election Law of 1925. At the time many European governments set daunting deposits to try to keep the riff-raff out of politics. But whereas the deposit for a parliamentary candidate in Britain remained fixed at £150 from 1918 until 1985 (it is now £500), the Japanese rates kept pace with inflation. Moreover, Britain has lowered the threshold below which a deposit is forfeited from 12.5% of votes to 5%. Other countries have done away with deposits altogether. America, for one, does not require them.

Some would like Japan to follow suit. A group of lawyers led by Kenji Utsunomiya, who has twice run unsuccessfully for governor of Tokyo (a deposit of ¥3m, which he retained), is making its third attempt in the city’s courts to have deposits scrapped. The Diet, Japan’s parliament, toyed with lowering them in 2008, but did not. Ironically, says Mr Miyabe, the initiative came from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which dominates Japanese politics and is easily the country’s best-funded party. Its intention in proposing the change, cynics say, was not to open politics to the rabble, but to hobble the Democratic Party of Japan, a left-leaning rival, by attracting more candidates and thus splitting the opposition. At any rate, with the Democrats now enfeebled, the LDP seems to have lost interest in changing things.